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July 28, 2009

Victory Shall Be Mine!

Here's the color of today:

It's really not the best representation. If you want to, go here and see it. (Although I think the color is actually a bit more blue and a bit less gray on my wall.)

This gorgeous color (trust me - it's beautiful!) will grace my bedroom walls. It matches perfectly with the great carpet we got which changes between a gray/blue and a deeper midnight-ish blue depending on how you look at it. The carpet is pretty neat: it's made from corn. Besides been kind of "green," it's super soft and cushy. We're doing the bedrooms, hallway and stairs with variations of it.

They started working on the house at the end of last week. (And by they I mean the tradesmen that will make my life hell for the next couple of weeks. We're three days in and already I'm ready to quit.) The electricians are gone and the floor guys started today (we're having the first floor wood floors refinished. Figured it was good to get that done while the house is empty.) Then paint, then finish the floors, then carpet then MOVE! I've packed a total of...TWO boxes. Books. I'm not sure you've ever seen my house, but my book collection makes my yarn collection look like I started knitting two weeks ago. Truly. The really sad thing is that I have barely any wall space in the new house for all the bookcases. There are a TON of windows - literally walls of windows, which is wonderful and makes our Tudor home bright and cheery, but doesn't leave a lot of wall space for bookshelves. For sure a lot of them will end up in storage. Anyway, I've packed two boxes of books. Only 58 more to go.

Another thing about the new house: I have my own yarn/fiber room! There is a really lovely sun room off of the main entrance/hallway and it's ALL windows (except for the doorway wall) and it's got a slate floor and I've bought a lovely area rug (the pattern is the same as the gorgeous one I bought for the dining room - only it's a different color scheme.) Eventually I'll get a nice chaise chair and some other seating but as soon as we move in my fantastic yarn cabinet (it's worth it to click on all the links - in the order linked) will go in there and my wheel! I'm going to make sure my wheel has a special place in the house. The poor thing has been in storage for forever!

The victory in the title is the whole reason I can write this post. Weaning Meli continues on with the usual ups and downs. One of my biggest problems is that I nurse her to sleep and I can't NOT nurse her to sleep. Other people, like my mom and dad, can get her to fall asleep without nursing, but unless we're out and about and she falls asleep in the car or on a walk, I have to nurse her to sleep. She just won't let herself go. Welp, today, after a long day of tantrums and play and general clingy-ness to the point of exhaustion, she let me sing and rock her to sleep. SANS BOOB! I was even able to put her down on the bed and she stayed asleep! I can't tell you what a triumph this is for me. There's hope that we won't be nursing forever! (Especially since I have to be DONE COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY by the first or second week of September.) Full disclosure: while I was writing this blog post she woke up and I went into bed and nursed her back to sleep. Otherwise she would never have stayed sleeping and she wasn't ready to wake up and I wasn't done writing. See what I sacrifice for the blog?

So, small victories. I really shouldn't be blogging at all. I should be working or packing or folding laundry. But no, I'm blogging and it feels really good! Thanks!

Posted by Cara at 07:20 PM | Comments (24)

July 24, 2009

Color of the Day

I'm pretty sure this will be the new color of my new EXTREMELY beige kitchen:

It's not the best representation. If you want to, go here and see it.

And here's my beige kitchen:

Realtor Photo

There isn't actually a lot of wall space in the kitchen that will be painted. The tiles go up really high and there are a few nice big windows with wide wood trim. The kitchen overall is pretty good - not the best, not the worst. We have a lot of cabinets, but surprisingly little counter top space. Who am I kidding? There's a refrigerator, a dishwasher and there will be a microwave soon. The kitchen's PERFECT.

We're only painting a few rooms in the house - a couple of bedrooms, the dining room and the kitchen. Believe it or not, I've had a crisis of confidence when it comes to color. But after painting a few samples on the walls yesterday I'm feeling better.

This awesome yellow is a great start.

PS - Thank you all for the comments yesterday. They're still all going to the junk folder but I tweeked things a little bit this morning so hopefully I'll be getting comments emailed to me again. Off to meet with painters this morning then joining my siblings and parents for a weekend at the beach. Hope you have a good one. Next up: The Master Bedroom Color. It's a good one!

Posted by Cara at 07:02 AM | Comments (24)

July 23, 2009

It's Alive!

Oh my god! I really thought I had killed my blog.

So I post this super long post in a super long while and... nothing happened. As far as I was concerned I didn't get a single comment. At first I thought this was weird and then I did some snooping around - no comments in MT in the comment section OR the entry. Nothing in my email. The comments appeared to be working. This precipitated an existential looking back on the last almost five years of this blog and an OH MY GOD I KILLED MY BLOG! It was my own fault. If you don't post, people don't read and with all the competition out there (twitter, ravelry, facebook) who can blame them?

In the end I was surprisingly okay with it all.

Then I posted again and still no comments and I was curious but resolved that if I was going to continue with the blog, well, it WAS really only going to be for me! I said it all along and now it was really true and that was OKAY. Pressure was off and maybe I could even get back into writing again the way I used to about things I love and excite me and I could be all funny and pithy and I could build it all back up again. Or not. I did it once I could do it again and besides I'm doing it all for me anyway so what's the difference if it works or not. I've always said you have to write for yourself in the end or it doesn't really work even though the audience is a super big plus.

I end up being all proud of myself for not being so upset that I've lost you all and gone ahead and killed the blog and I'm sitting here patting myself on the back for being so grown up about it (I will be 40 in January and I've been thinking a lot about being grown up) and then I get a hit on bloglines from my comment feed and WAIT... there actually ARE comments!

Turns out that there were actually quite a few comments (THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!) and that somehow they had all been trapped by the spam filters and ended up in the junk bin. That's why they didn't show up on the blog - at least most of them didn't - and they didn't hit my email and they didn't hit the MT entry and I have no idea why all of this happened but in the end I'm glad. (The truth is my MT needs desperately to be updated but I don't have it in me to do it anymore. I used to be able to stay up for days figuring it all out but those days are long gone. I'm not sure what I'm going to do here.)

It was an excellent exercise in the long run because I'm still here. For better or worse. With you all or all by lonesome. Seems I'm not quite done yet.

Thank you for reading!! I can't tell you how much I appreciate your presence.

Posted by Cara at 07:34 AM | Comments (32)

July 16, 2009

Mommy Says

Here are some Meli tricks. She's my rambunctious 16 month old now - no more a baby!

A Command Performance from January One on Vimeo.

Meli and the Jets from January One on Vimeo.

Thanks for watching!
L, C & M

Posted by Cara at 06:16 PM | Comments (15)

July 15, 2009

Checking In

Hey everybody! I finally got a minute to check out some blogs, read this post and was inspired to check in.

Things have been crazy.

We closed on our new house two weeks ago and I thought it would make me feel better - you know - have some closure on the whole thing - but it's only made things worse. I love the new house - LOVE IT - but it still feels like we're miles away from actually living there. We still are no where close to selling our current apartment - even though we've dropped our price to obscene levels. Every other week we get a looker but the only people who have been interested live in the building and are scared because they have to sell their own place. NOTHING is moving here right now. Absolutely nothing.

So since we have two places we thought we'd do a little cosmetic work to the new house before we move in. We're putting in some carpet upstairs and we'd like to redo the first floor wood floors while it's empty and my kitchen is beige to an extreme degree so I want to paint that as well as some other rooms and we need some electrical work done and I call and call and call vendors and I can barely get a proposal out of them and when I do, no one calls you back when you WANT TO HIRE THEM! It's so unbelievably frustrating. I thought the housing market and everything about it was in a slump? Vendors were begging for work? Not around here I guess.

I honestly haven't even started packing my apartment yet because we don't have a move out date and I need that fire to get packing. Literally.

I'm back and forth all the time and it's exhausting.

I have been knitting though! I finished all of the second socks to these first socks - so I have FIVE NEW PAIRS of socks for the winter. And believe it or not, I started a second set of five socks. All monkeys, all STR. I would be more than happy to show you them and I promise I will someday but the amount of work - taking the picture, loading it onto the computer, resizing it, blah blah blah - would just about kill me. That's how emotionally, physically and mentally tired I am these days. And we haven't even gotten to the hard stuff yet.

On the other hand, Meli is absolutely fantastic. She's running, dancing, jumping (sort of) singing and she talks NON STOP from the minute she wakes up until she falls asleep. She has so many words and every day new ones pop out and she will try to say whatever you say. I'm working on happy birthday right now for my sister's birthday on Friday. The saddest and sweetest thing she says is "here we go." Whenever she's upset and we're in the car I guess I always say "here we go, here we go my love" to tell her that we're on our way home and now, whenever she's really upset she'll start saying "here we go." It just about breaks my heart but at the same time I'm bursting with the sweetness.

I'm in full court press on the weaning these days. I was doing fairly well weaning her during the day and then we took like eighty steps back and these week I've gone hard core. When she wakes up in the morning and has her last nurse, I tell her to say bye bye to the boobs, that we'll see them when we go to sleep. We have our moments during the day, but for the most part she's pretty good as long. I've got her drinking either chocolate or strawberry milk (our peds recommendation when she wouldn't drink plain milk) out of these great cups (she prefers the straw) and when she's upset I can usually get her to drink her milk while I hold her and she settles down. I have to say though we've been on the go A LOT. I feel like if we stop she'll want to nurse so I run run run to keep her occupied. Another reason I'm exhausted. If things work our for the next week or so and we are through nursing during the day, I'm going to try this method for night weaning. My sister used it to wean her youngest - she said it was hard, but it worked. Oh and before I get crap for weaning her - the fertility clinic said she had to be weaned before I could start treatment again. What's best for my family is best for my family. Discussion over.

Anyway, so that's what we're up to. They didn't open our pool this summer because the construction is ongoing - when they work, that is, which is sad because we can't even enjoy our last summer here. But we're taking long walks and playing in playgrounds and I bought a hose and a wading pool for our new fabulous backyard. Summer seems like it might finally be here and I don't care how tired I am, we're going to enjoy it.

Hope your summer is going great! Thanks for checking in - I hope to be back soon!
L, C

Posted by Cara at 12:42 PM | Comments (24)